Frederic Crozat wrote:
From a distribution PoV, static linking mean you can't fix somethingone time and be sure the fix is available for ALL programs using the library.
Yes, that explanation is usually one of the two things brought up. I do wonder whether it's true or not though, in the wider world. "Shared library hell" seems a big price to pay for the very occasional bug fix, especially since such bugs will usually be of a very minor nature, since the application will have been tested against the buggy library in the first place.
While I can understand static linking might be a nice workaround for people distributing binaries, as a distro maintainer for more than 8 years, I can certified you it is just a workaround and it should be avoided as much as possible (specially if programs are available for the distribution).
I'm sure it works well within a distribution, because you can control the application environment. It's not clear to me whether it works in the wider world, where there are many different application environments. Graeme Gill.
